ICCSD Email Switch In Progress

The District completed the configuration necessary to switch to Gmail for email service last night at 8 PM. This transition is in progress, but propagation of the change has been slower than we anticipated (more details below). As such, emails are still being delivered to Exchange, and users can access emails and calendar information as you always have. You may also notice that some emails are being delivered to your Google accounts; as of 7:30 this morning, those emails will be automatically forwarded to your Exchange account as well. Once the change has been fully propagated, we’ll notify users of the time at which new emails will only be delivered to Google.

Technical Details (not critical, but this explains what’s going on): When we made the switch last night, we updated our mail exchange (MX) records to point to Google’s email servers, rather than our internal Exchange servers. This change was made at Grant Wood AEA, and from there gets replicated on DNS (domain name servers) around the world. You can see in the image at right that the majority of DNS servers in the country are now seeing Google’s servers when lookup up the MX record for @iowacityschools.org emails.

While this process usually takes some time to complete, it is rare for the process to take more than 12 hours. As we stand right now, we believe that this process will take a full 18 hours for our change to fully propagate, meaning that in the meantime, emails may be delivered to Google or to Exchange, depending upon whether the relevant DNS server has been updated with our current settings. In order to address this issue, we set up forwarding this morning such that all emails received by Google will, for now, be automatically forwarded to Exchange. Once the DNS changes are complete, we’ll verify that all emails are going to the correct place and then disable email forwarding. We’ll notify users when this change is made.